You can read David’s summary of his idea for yourself, but in brief, he wants to find a way to allow the public to benefit from all the knowledge of future news events locked up inside newsrooms. Reporters know a lot about things that are going to happen or likely to happen. Some of these are highly predictable: Federal employment data will be released on the first Friday of the month. (Except when it isn’t.) Some are less structured: An indictment is followed by an arraignment and preliminary hearings and a trial. (Again, except when it isn’t.) Some are easily findable by a motivated member of the public; some are known only to, say, an experienced city hall reporter who understands the rhythms of the beat.

Most of this information stays locked inside newsrooms — maybe in a staff-wide tickler file, maybe in a unstructured Word doc on a reporter’s laptop, maybe only in her head. Could you create a standardized way to gather these future news events in a way that could be (a) useful to the news organization, but also (b) perhaps publishable in some form to readers?